Webpages posted by online publishers have a number of user interface elements that are used to distribute content to visitors of the webpage. One such user interface element is a newsfeed, also referred to as a feed. A feed comprises a seemingly never-ending sequence of content items or links to content items that are selectable by the user.
Online publishers are incented to have users view as many content items in the feed as possible. As such, online publishers populate the feed using a greedy algorithm that places content items having a higher click-through rate (CTR) near the top of the feed. Viewers, however, may navigate away from the feed after only viewing a few content items, meaning that they have viewed fewer content items than the online publishers would like them to have viewed.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.